Welcome to The Caterpillar Room
Building strong readers and confident learners for life.
A boutique, research-based literacy and learning clinic in Brooklyn. We help students from pre-K through 6th grade become confident readers, writers, and lifelong learners through explicit, evidence-based instruction.
Our clinics
Choose the Learning Experience That’s Right for Your Child
We offer three evidence-based instructional options to meet every learner’s needs, from collaborative academic clinics with 6–10 students, to individualized private instruction and specialized Structured Literacy intervention. Click below to learn more or enroll.
Academic/Literacy Clinics
What Is a Literacy Clinic?
A literacy clinic is more than tutoring. It is a structured, research-based learning environment where children receive explicit, multisensory instruction grounded in the Science of Reading and cognitive science.
Our small-group clinics are intentionally limited to 6–10 students, allowing teachers to provide individualized support while fostering collaboration and confidence.
Through systematic instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, morphology, comprehension, spelling, and writing, students build the foundational skills needed to become successful, lifelong readers and writers.
Whether a child needs intervention or academic acceleration, every lesson is purposeful, cumulative, and designed to move them forward.
Private Instruction
1:1 Private Academic Sessions
Our private one-to-one sessions provide individualized instruction for students who benefit from focused attention and personalized pacing.
Whether a child needs support with reading, writing, spelling, mathematics, executive functioning, homework, test preparation, or mastery of a specific academic skill, each lesson is tailored to meet their unique goals.
With undivided teacher attention, instruction is targeted, efficient, and responsive, allowing students to build confidence, strengthen skills, and make meaningful academic progress.
Specialized Intervention
1:1 Structured Literacy Intervention
Our one-to-one Structured Literacy sessions are designed for students with language-based learning differences, including dyslexia, dysgraphia, and other reading and spelling difficulties.
Using an Orton-Gillingham approach, instruction is explicit, systematic, cumulative, and multisensory, helping students build the foundational skills necessary for successful reading and written language.
Lessons are individualized and may include phonological awareness, phonics, decoding, encoding (spelling), syllable types, morphology, fluency, and reading comprehension. Instruction is carefully paced to each student's needs, ensuring mastery before new concepts are introduced and providing the intensive intervention necessary for lasting progress.
What is the Reading Brain
The reading brain is built, not born
Unlike speaking, reading isn’t something the brain is wired for at birth. Learning to read physically rewires it — building new connections between the regions that process the sounds of speech, the letters on the page, and their meaning. That network is the reading brain.
The Science of Reading shows us how those connections form: through explicit, systematic, multisensory instruction that maps sound to print. That’s exactly how we teach — organized around the Five Pillars of Reading and an Orton-Gillingham scope and sequence, so every child builds the pathways that make skilled reading automatic.
Explore the four reading networksPhonemic Awareness
Hearing and manipulating the individual sounds in spoken words.
Phonics
Connecting those sounds to letters and spelling patterns.
Fluency
Reading accurately, at a comfortable pace, and with expression.
Vocabulary
The store of word meanings a reader brings to a text.
Comprehension
Understanding and making meaning from what is read.
The five essential components of reading instruction were identified by the National Reading Panel (2000).
Not sure where to start?
Take our 1-minute clinic finder
Answer two quick questions about your child and we’ll point you to the right starting point, then follow up with a recommendation.
Find your child's clinicGet started
Ready to help your child thrive?
Book a consultation or a phonics screener, and we'll help you find the right starting point.